Shared Meals, Shared Knowledge

This year, Slow Food USA, which defines “slow food” as good for its eaters, its producers and the environment — a definition anyone can get behind — set out to demonstrate that slow food can also be affordable, not only a better alternative to fast food but a less expensive one. The organization issued a $5 Challenge with the inspired rallying cry of “take back the ‘value meal’,” which in most fast food restaurants runs somewhere around five bucks.

Under the leadership of its president, Josh Viertel, Slow Food has moved from a group of rah-rah supporters of artisanal foods to become a determined booster of sustainability and of real food for everyone. Last month it called for people to cook pot luck and community dinners for no more than $5 per person. “We gave ourselves a month to launch the first big public day of action in what we hoped would become an ongoing challenge,” says Viertel. “In those four weeks we hoped to organize 500 people to host meals on Sept. 17. Our dream was to have 20,000 people participate.”

They did far better than the 500-meal mark; more than 5,500 people hosted dinners, and more than 30,000 enjoyed the new value meal. Slow Food intends to make this an ongoing project, and is calling for a repeat performance of the $5 Challenge for Oct. 24, which not coincidentally is Food Day. (That’s another subject, but I encourage you to click that link; the six goals on Food Day’s home page succinctly sum up the current issues in food.)
Frugality in cooking has a long and powerful history and a pathetic present. With the exuberant abundance of the post-war half-century, many Americans forgot the lessons brought over from the old countries, honed during the rapid but harsh development of the 19th century, the lean years of the Depression, the rationing of the 1940s. Old-timers made soup from scraps, saw potatoes as a main course and considered three squares the pinnacle of good living.

Can you imagine? Now fast-food joints litter the eight-lane thoroughfares that rip through most cities and suburbs. If you want a pizza, you reach into the freezer or make a phone call; you get hungry, you pop something in the microwave, pull into the drive-thru, wait on a line. We have become accustomed not to real food but to “convenience,” one of the filthiest of modern catchwords, and to the ill health and waste associated with it. (Some estimate that 50 percent of all food produced in the U.S. is wasted, and that doesn’t include the junk that isn’t worth producing in the first place.)

Though cooking is healthier for land and bodies, marketing, habit, social pressures and the false belief that it’s expensive (it isn’t, as I demonstrated in this Review piece Sunday), have all but killed it. To become a healthier, more sustainable population — in every sense of both adjectives — one of the major goals of the foreseeable future must be to encourage a shift from ubiquitous fast food to the all-but-vanished craft of cooking and associated thrift.

How that might happen is the subject of thousands of conversations, but the movement is in full swing, as the Slow Food campaign demonstrates. Showing that buying normal ingredients from a regular grocery store and cooking them at home is cheaper than going out to eat doesn’t present much of a challenge, but feedback I get when I write about this shows both that it surprises some people while leaving others wondering why this common knowledge isn’t more common.

One problem is that too often we let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we paint the only acceptable alternative to fast food as local, sustainable, organic and fair, we make it nearly impossible to progress along the spectrum from bad food to better food. Ethical, sustainable food is surely the ideal, but to get there we have to encourage the purchase and preparation of available food that can then be cooked (or eaten raw, for that matter) at home.

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There are millions of people throughout the country who routinely buy and cook “slow food” — I’d prefer the term “real food,” but whatever — and spend very little money doing it. (Five dollars per person is a generous, even unachievable budget in many kitchens, but it really is no more than the cost of fast food — and for many people it’s a trifle — and it’s a sum that will allow and encourage cooks to upgrade to sustainably raised food.) Slow Food wanted to find out how thrifty shopper-cooks do what they do, and to encourage them to share their tips and tricks with one another and with as many neighbors as possible, and the site on which they do so is fun and inspiring.

All of this is indeed a “challenge” largely because we’ve strayed so far from our roots. Real food, generally speaking, is seasonal food, a notion that has been reduced to pumpkins turned into jack-o-lanterns, followed by cranberry sauce (sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, no less). Yet shopping and cooking seasonally means eating more locally, eating less imported food, relying on staples like grains and beans, reducing your food’s carbon footprint and eating a healthier diet — all desirable outcomes.

There is a steep learning curve here, along with the well-publicized issues of access. Not just seasonal food but any fresh food is difficult to find for some people, and even more people have no idea what to do with it once they bring it home. Slow Food believes that the very best way to build the kind of social movement needed to produce the systemic changes that they seek is to start small: to share knowledge and to share meals. What’s wrong with that?